Young Offenders Act - is it too harsh?

How realistic is it, then, to expect parents to carry out a responsibility that even security guards guards in .a penitentiary are not always able to handle? By Aijaz Husain

It is now virtually certain that the 15 year-old

Young Offenders Act, perceived by many conservative groups in the country as "toothless" and "too soft" on tender-age law breakers, is about to face its demise.

In its place, the federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan has introduced in Parliament a new piece of legislation that promises to be "tough, yet compassionate" in dealing with juvenile crime in Canada. The proposed law, to be known as the Youth Criminal Justice Act, has many features that its proponents believe will satisfy the critics of the old actings, injected in it two new So far that hasn't happened. The hard-liners are not impressed. They simply see the proposed law as nothing more than just an old wine in a new bottle.

However, the new law is anything but a repackaging of the old stuff. In order to make it palatable to the political right, the law framers have, among other things, injected in it two new elements, namely: the lowering of age of the most violent offenders from 16 to 14 years for automatic transfer of their cases to adult courts for trial; and jailing parents who "wilfully" fail to supervise youths placed in their care under some kind of undertaking. It is these two elements that are indeed very disturbing.

First, a closer look at the proposed lowering of age for trials in adult courts. The measure, we are told, is essential to give better protection to society from offenders who tend to be very dangerous. While the concern for the protection of society is indeed legitimate, the question is: how legitimate is it to treat a 14 or 15-year-old child as an adult?

True, some 14 and 15-year_olds are capable of committing the most horrendous crimes. For that matter, even children far younger in age are known to have, on occasion, committed crimes that are, in no way less horrific. If a seven year old, in mischief or anger, burns down a house causing fatalities, should society treat that child as an adult?

Wouldn't that be inconsistent with the child protection laws in Canada that define a child as anyone under the age of 16 years? Would that not also constitute a violation of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Canada is a signatory _ a convention that defines the child as "every human being below the age of l8years"?

To the advocates of tougher laws, trials of young offenders in adult courts mean only one thing: severe penalties and longer jail terms _ basically a "locking up and throw away the key " approach.

That approach, unfortunately, does not take into account the potential for change in young criminals _ the strong probability that, with some intense rehabilitative work, they may still be retrieved from the world of crime and turned into responsible, law_abiding citizens.

This is not to say that society should allow violent young thugs to freely roam around and cause pain and suffering to countless innocent people. The imperatives of making them face the consequences of their actions, and keeping society adequately protected from their abnormal behaviour cannot be overstated.

But then the imperative of maintaining a balance between too much punishment and too much leniency cannot be ignored either. No

matter how serious their offences, making them languish in penal institutions for long periods of time where they will be rubbing shoulders with the country's most hardened criminals, will not only be a miscarriage of justice, but will also be a form of child abuse in itself. Yet a second feature in the proposed law that is equally disturbing is the provision that parents can be held accountable for failing to exercise appropriate supervision and control over children placed in their care under some form of agreement.

The legislation envisages a jail term of up to two years for parents who are found to be derelict in the discharge of their responsibility

under that agreement. It is a kind of measure that criminalizes parental inability, or even unwillingness, to supervise an unruly youth.

It is a well known fact that the youths who are in conflict with the law are invariably in conflict with their parents as well. Many of these youths have unmet developmental needs, a deficit that is a carryover from years of neglect and abuse they may have suffered in their early childhood. Thus, many of them present behaviour problems that are beyond their caregivers' coping ability.

Parents cannot be singled out for not being able to prevent Aacting out@ children from running away and committing offences. How often does it happen that inmates from highly secure penal institutions somehow manage to escape? But the security guards in those institutions are never held accountable for it, and never punished.

How realistic is it, then, to expect parents to carry out a responsibility that even security guards in a penitentiary are not always able to handle? Holding parents accountable for the misdeeds of their children, and then punishing them for it, is something that is beyond the dictates of reason. At a time when youth crime is on the decline, what we need most is not harsher laws, but more preventative services and more resources that can be put into use by parents and communities to keep their children from falling prey to the lure of crime and violence as glorified by the movies and the TV shows. 

Husain, a social work educator; teaches at the University of Regina.

Information from Ont. Coalition for Social Justice.